In the 1930’s, Central Oklahoma would have made any film director looking for an “On Location” site for a movie depicting the seven plagues of Ancient Egypt drool with desire.   Most of Oklahoma, after enduring the destruction of the Dust Bowl, foreclosures on family farms and double-digit unemployment had one more abomination to deal with.  The Good Lord allowed Lucifer to send a plague of hungry grasshoppers onto the land.  The moment you stepped outside the house in any direction you would be fighting off grasshoppers.  A harmless nuisance to people but they were an unappeasable death threat to any green leafed vegetable.  Tree leaves, corn stalks, grass and the green leafy parts of anything growing were all targets for the insatiable appetite of those grasshoppers.

We little kids whose ages were in the single digits didn’t mind them so much; we enjoyed capturing and playing with these interesting and harmless (to us) insects.  Yes, more than once a captured grasshopper would have his “kicker legs” pulled off and then be released to presumably spend the rest of his life walking the earth didn’t do it in meanness.  It was curiosity.  Everyone who has ever handled a grasshopper knows that they produce something that looks like tobacco juice that they salivated out of their mouths when threatened.  That was fun to watch.  In just a few minutes a lively little boy could gather a mason jar full of grasshoppers to “study.”  Adults didn’t tell little kids much in those days so we were blissfully ignorant of the damage our little playmates were causing. 

The citizens around Drumright, OK knew very well the damage the hoppers were doing and they were at their wit’s end trying to cope with that plague.  Then someone came up with an idea so simple and appealing that it was immediately put into practice.  Drumright had two movie theaters at that time: the “Tower,” located at the crest of the hill on which Drumright's main drag was laid out and the “Midwest” halfway down the hill.  The “Tower” catered to the more well-to-do (a very relative term in The Depression) while the “Midwest” showed the cowboy and crime kinds of shows.

The manager of the “Midwest” was persuaded to go along with a scheme to allow anyone who brought a quart jar filled with grasshoppers free admission to the Saturday matinee movie.  It certainly wasn’t the final answer to the “Great Grasshopper Plague” but it surely helped and even more certainly gave lots of urchins something to do with their time during the summer days.  Someone had built a huge sort of cage of 2 X 4’s and screen wire that was about the size of a good-sized dumpster.  It had a trapdoor in the top.  We handed our grasshopper-filled quart jars to an attendant who opened the trapdoor carefully and shook the contents of our jar down into the cage, gave us a ticket, and we were off to the darkened movie theater.

I never gave any thought to what they did with the grasshoppers.  I supposed they found some way to destroy them, possibly with fire.  In any case the fate of the grasshoppers didn’t interest me nearly as much as what was going to happen to the Cowboy in the White Hat when that guy wearing a Black Hat caught up with him.